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Proactive organizations are driven by a vision!
Companies endlessly wrestle with the perennial challenge of managing a business efficiently and endeavouring to equipoise short run aims with long-term goals. Reconciling shareholder expectations, which are predominantly short term, with laying the foundations of long run growth is a highly onerous process, though one which is integral to the whole evolution of a company. This essential discipline represents an arduous balancing act, to say the very least, particularly for enterprises that lack a coherent and clearly articulated vision.
A vision is more than an aphorism for “having a focus”. The vision of a company, or where a company endeavours to be, epitomizes the company’s very raison d’être, and palpably permeates the culture of the organization, giving it impetus and fuelling the modi operandi that spur it on to deliver the needs of the customer. Leadership, charged with the responsibility of steering the helm of the ship, can only induce a sense of strategic direction once a vision has been formulated. Penury in this regard must be eschewed otherwise the business is likely to embark on a perilous journey fraught with the increasing probability of encountering that much catastrophic tempest of precipitous decline, which even in the best of circumstances can be difficult to weather!
According to Nils-Göran Olve, Jan Roy and Magnus Wetter on page 41 of their very pragmatic book, Performance drivers: A practical guide to using the balanced scorecard, published in 1999: “By vision, we mean a company’s desired future situation. The purpose of the vision is to guide, control, and challenge an entire organization towards realising a shared perception of the company in the future.”
Employees, therefore, need to feel a sense of ownership in relation to the vision, which is critical to its sound implementation, with the vision espoused underpinned by a sense of aspiration and realism that achieves emotional buy-in from them [the employees] and other constituents comprising the enterprise’s stakeholder model.
The vision is the mantra about which companies should repose their focus, harmonise their resources, and unleash their capabilities. Notably, it precedes the mission statement, which reflects how an organization intends to achieve the vision itself. As the experience of vanguard companies evinces, the vision is key to enamouring the workforce, since it enables employees to relate to the “bigger picture”, thereby helping to fortify and further stimulate their motivation, morale and resolve. It ensures that organizations only engage in those specific activities that are seamlessly related to achieving the vision, rendering redundant other activities not connected to accomplishing the vision that may otherwise have consumed precious resources and debilitatingly drained invaluable reserves of emotional energy. (The emphasis in this article is specifically on the corporate vision only: strategic business units need to evolve visions, which are suited to their particular circumstances and that are crucially inspired by, and consistent with, the corporate vision!)
Employees, customers, shareholders, and stakeholders in general are not delimited in their enthusiasm to apprehend the vision developed by the company’s leadership, which, above all, signals to them that the organization is not rudderless. Suffice to say, the annals of corporate history are replete with innumerable examples of rudderless enterprises, which have sailed into turbulent waters and sunk!
Developing an intelligent and realistic vision should be the first priority of any company leadership. The vision is intrinsic to defining the purpose or cause earmarked for the firm. This cause should revolve around an obsessive, burning passion to provide customers with the value added experiences they yearn for.
Customer experience transcends the restrictive and supply led nature of product market boundaries and brings to the fore the importance of competing in what Professor Sandra Vandermerwe critically terms market spaces in her landmark book, Customer capitalism: The new business model of increasing returns in new market spaces [1999]. Market spaces are crucially defined in terms of the results or experiences solicited by customers. Lego, for instance, competes in a market space defined as “total family edutainment” [p. 82] and has also penetrated the “home learning” sub market space [p. 82].
Significantly, the accent is on “originating for and with customers” [p. 8] and the market space and sub market space cited encompass results deeply valued by customers. Competing in market spaces, rather than markets, therefore appears to be the insignia of proactive, new economy organizations.
Proactive companies are constantly channelling their energies to improve the quality of the customer experience and are guided in their strategic endeavours by market spaces. Percipiently, they have avoided the pitfall of crafting a corporate vision that is incarcerated by market boundaries, instead deriving one that stresses the premier position of customer experience in the new economy.
Proactive organizations are also conscious of when it might be appropriate to change their vision in light of the increasing future demands that will be placed on them as they seek to address and optimise customer experience. For example, Microsoft is now striving “to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential” (see
Proactive companies’ visions are in no way encumbered by industry boundaries as inherently there is an acceptance on their part that it is only through the convergence of different industries and through accepting the reality of cross-industry partnerships that customer needs can be fully accommodated.
Proactive enterprises do not pay lip service to formulating a coherent corporate vision. Recognising that it is the life-line of intelligent, strategic endeavour they assign significant thought and care to crystallising a vision that will enable them to maintain their competitiveness. Having created their vision, proactive firms further demarcate themselves through their outstanding organizational competency for implementing it. Possessing a vision, which spawns customer value propositions that consistently deliver differentiable customer experience, is the trademark of proactive organizations!
The writer
